Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.
Interpretation
Tolerance cannot accept actions or beliefs that are intolerant.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing boundaries when it comes to tolerance. While it is essential to accept diverse perspectives, there are limits to this acceptance when faced with beliefs or actions that seek to undermine or destroy the very values of tolerance and coexistence. It calls for a balance between openness to differing views and safeguarding against harmful ideologies that promote intolerance.
In practice
During a debate on campus, this quote could be used to highlight the need for a respectful discourse while addressing hate speech.
A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.
Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.
In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
The mob that hails the man on horseback, the Caesars and conquering heroes, does not retain its freedoms for long.
I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.
I urge you to ask yourself just how honorable it is to preside over the abuse and suffering of animals.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
If in a country, most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, then this country can hardly witness harmony and stability.
Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.
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